For a few months in the late 1980s, I tried to organize a Vietnam Veterans group, not the easiest thing to do in Canada, although some 10,000 Canadians joined the U.S. Army and U.S. Marines.* I was surprised (I shouldn't have been) that some wannabe Vietnam vets tried to join. I met one guy at a MacDonald's for coffee, and soon realized that even at the end of the war, he couldn't have more than 15.
One of my best "post-war" moments was when my wife and I were taking a morning walk on the seawall around Coal Harbour, here in Vancouver. I was wearing my 1st Marine Division Vietnam vet's baseball hat. A couple about our age was walking in the opposite direction, and as we passed, the guy said, "Good morning, Marine." That felt really good! But please don't say, "Thank you for your service."
I had just one broad goal in Vietnam: I wanted to stay alive, and wanted, as their hospital corpsman, to keep "my" Marines alive. I couldn't have cared less about "fighting for democracy" or "the flag" or "Mom & apple pie," because I knew that those things weren't in danger, and that we had been sent into harm's way by powerful men in Washington who didn't give a damn about us.
I have mostly bad memories of my service in Vietnam, but there were good moments too, and at least it gave me ideas for models to build. So far, I've completed a model UH-34D Seahorse helicopter like the ones that carried me into combat and later, after I was shot, transported me to a field hospital and then to the hospital ship Repose, which I have also completed.
Bob
* Those 10,000 Canadian volunteers? Some of the Canadian vets I met had been wounded in Vietnam, they didn't qualify for long-term hospital care back in the States, and none of them received disability payments. Even their enlistment records were destroyed.
On the bench: A diorama to illustrate the crash of a Beech T-34B Mentor which I survived in 1962 (I'm using Minicraft's 1/48 model of the Mentor), and a Pegasus model of the submarine Nautilus of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas fame.